Eleven of this week's stories, drawn as specimens on a single Haeckel plate: the lederhosen self, a caffeine jellyfish, a circadian clock, a Montana vial, a fugitive automaton, a badly labeled Africa, a robot vacuum, an eight-glasses waterbearer, a con-artist dolphin, a bioluminescent mouse, and the impossible color olo. The same prompt went to ChatGPT, Gemini, and Perplexity. Click any plate to enlarge and inspect at full resolution.
The three renderings
The most committed to the conceit: it forged a full lithographer's imprint ("Lith. Anst. v. E. Haeckel, Jena"), a millimeter scale bar, and a bottom row of extra micro-specimens nobody asked for. It also won the mislabeled-Africa gag outright — "Sahara Deluxe," "Cape Not So Good Hope," "Madagascar (attached)" — and rendered the glowing-and-extinguished mouse pair better than either rival.
The cleanest and most legible — closer to a modern textbook plate than a period lithograph. It was the only model to take "hugging face" literally and stamp an actual 🤗 beside the escaping automaton. It also lost the plot on the central specimen, drawing Mus lucifer as two sea anemones with no mouse at all, and double-printed a couple of the numbers: tidiness bought at the cost of accuracy.
The warm middle path: full ornate border, compass-rose corners, all eleven specimens present and correctly numbered. Its consent-form vial reads "Informiert · Freiwillig · Widerruflich" — a genuinely apt informed / voluntary / revocable gloss — and its Homo demographicus is the jolliest of the three, beer stein and all. Less luminous than ChatGPT's, but the most internally consistent plate.
The prompt
A single ornate lithographic plate in the exact style of Ernst Haeckel's "Kunstformen der Natur" (1904): dense bilateral and radial symmetry, scientific-illustration precision, fine engraved stipple linework, chromolithograph on aged cream paper, an ornate hand-drawn plate border, a decorative cartouche title at the top reading "Kunstformen der Woche," and a plate number "Tafel 84" in the corner. The plate is filled with numbered biological "specimens" (1-11), each a whimsical hybrid organism, arranged symmetrically around a large glowing central specimen. Each has a small hand-lettered mock-Latin label: 1. "Homo demographicus" — a symmetrical specimen of a jolly middle-aged man in Bavarian lederhosen and knee socks, pinned like a beetle, tagged "male · 35+ · United States." 2. "Medusa cafeïna" — a jellyfish whose translucent bell is a steaming coffee cup, trailing tentacles of coffee-cherry and tea-leaf filaments. 3. "Horologium circadianum" — a radial clock-diatom, one half sunrise and one half night, its dial marked GMT-4 and GMT-5. 4. "Vialis montana" — an unlabeled medicine vial sprouting a curling consent-form frond, set against a tiny frontier mountain range. 5. "Automaton fugax" — a tentacled mechanical radiolarian breaking out through a broken hexagonal lattice cage, a small smiling "hugging face" emblem beside it. 6. "Charta africana erratica" — a specimen shaped like the continent of Africa, its regions cheerfully and incorrectly labeled. 7. "Robovacuum domesticus" — a round disc-shaped diatom with little wheels and trailing threads, nickname "Dustin." 8. "Octovitrum aquarius" — a colony of eight water-glass polyps around a sweat-soaked electrolyte sports jersey. 9. "Delphinus mercator" — a cunning dolphin-medusa hiding torn scraps of paper under one fin while baiting a gull with a fish. 10. "Mus lucifer" — the large luminous central specimen: a bioluminescent mouse-anemone radiating soft cyan-green light, with a darkened, extinguished twin beside it. 11. "Chroma impossibilis (olo)" — a tiny radiant organism glowing in an impossibly saturated blue-green, marked "0-1-0." Palette: muted naturalist ochres, sepias, corals, and deep teals on aged paper, with a few specimens emitting a luminous bioluminescent glow; the "olo" organism is the single most saturated, unreal blue-green on the plate. Vertical plate format, 4:5 aspect ratio, highly detailed.
One prompt, three models (ChatGPT/DALL·E, Gemini, Perplexity), rendered for the Week of August 3, 2026 issue of What Adam Is Reading. Style reference: Ernst Haeckel, Kunstformen der Natur (1904). Click any plate above to open it full-resolution in the lightbox; scroll within the frame to inspect the specimen labels.